Milestone

I quit my job today. 

Ok – it wasn’t today, but I did quit my job.  I sent my resignation letter in to my boss and friend on June 9.

How did I get here?  How did I go from making a very good income in a very stable career, a middle class working guy with a house, car, cat and family, everything marching forward to being unemployed on the high seas?  As with most things it was an evolutionary process.

It began during a vacation to French Polynesia.  As Janet is fond of saying, Moorea changed our DNA.  In the 2 weeks spent in this tropical paradise we went from mildly dissatisfied with the pace of our lives and the path we’d taken to a couple committed to living more consciously and making life decisions that reflected our values rather than following the safe, established route.  It was in Moorea that we came to realize that we could take some chances with our lives and that we did have the option to live differently.  It was the beginning of the end.

French Polynesia - It will change your DNA.

In the months that followed we made some precipitous decisions.  Janet decided to leave her job with Whole Foods Market in order to spend more time with the girls, volunteering at school and getting to know the other families in the neighbourhood.  We formulated Plan B – our plan to leave the rat race behind and take up full time travelling via sailboat.  The timeline was still to be determined but we were going to do it.

It was approximately one year later, in the fall of 2013 that we decided we had to go sooner rather than later.  My work continued to be challenging and interesting but I was not as committed to it as I had been in years past and there were significant changes underway.  I was struggling with the idea that I was expendable and that there was always the possibility that my hard work and loyalty could be rewarded with a pink slip.  We realized that life is short and you only get one chance to make it interesting.  Our someday plan became a reality with the target of taking one year to travel beginning at the end of June 2015.

In early 2015 after a hectic year preparing ourselves for our adventure we sold our home in North Vancouver, I applied for a leave of absence from work to last 1 year, and we purchased our boat, Maple in Greece.  Plan B was fast becoming a reality.

On July 7, 2015 we arrived in Greece and began our travels.  The year unfolded as the universe planned – unfortunately nobody let us in on the plans.  We had some significant challenges that we met head on and coming out better for the experience. 

The year, however, left us wanting more.  We remain eager to see the world, particularly the parts that few have the opportunity to visit.  We want to share it all with our girls and show them that adversity, when met with a positive attitude and strong work ethic can be easily overcome and turned into a learning experience.  We want to show them that anything at all is possible and that dreams should be followed.  We want them to understand that the less you have the less you need and happiness is not found in an iPhone lineup, but rather in the company of family and friends and in experiences shared. 

We are happier now, with no income and a dwindling bank account, than we were when we were working 50 hours a week for someone else’s benefit.

I quit my job.  With this simple act we’ve chosen the path less travelled.  It may be a more difficult journey, but it’s the hardship and challenges that remind us we’re alive and I expect that the view from this path will be worth the hard work.  Quitting isn’t the end, it’s the beginning of something entirely different, new and exciting.

Tough questions

One of the most common questions I get when I tell people what we're planning is simply why?  What has possessed you to choose to disrupt your life this way?  Why pull your kids out of school and away from their friends?  What about everything you're leaving behind?

That's a tough question.  Its tough for a couple of reasons.  First, our motivations are complicated.  There are layers of emotion and reason and intuition mixed with regrets, fears, dreams and aspirations.  Some days it all gets jumbled together and it takes hours of talking and thinking and glasses of wine to sort through.  Second, it can be hard to talk about the reasons for making choices so radically different than those made by people closest to you. Its easy to give the impression that the decision we're making is right and the decision others have made is  wrong.  There is no wrong or right here, just different paths that we all can choose.  What is right for us may be wrong for others and, who knows this may not even be right for us.  So care must be taken when answering the question "why?".

1. The only thing you can't get more of is time.  If you make this realization, then let it drive your course, amazing things can happen.  That's not to say people who trade their time for money, or their time for things are wrong, it's just not where my priorities lie.  That's easy to say coming from a middle class home in Canada, but I suspect I'll feel the same when I'm living below the Canadian poverty line.
2. There will come a time when my kids don't want to spend time with me.  This is like the axiom that youth is wasted on the young.  If I had the choice why wouldn't I spend time with my family when they (and I) are young, even if it means cat food for dinner after a long day working at Walmart when I'm older?  (For the record, I've never tried cat food and am confident it won't come to that and I'm actually not that confident that Walmart would hire me.)
3. Health and life are unpredictable.  Lets face it - we've all heard about the 66 year old who retired only to drop dead weeks after leaving work.
4. We got tired of living on 'autopilot'.  Go to school, graduate, go to University, get a job, get married, have kids, buy a house, have more kids...  It felt like we were doing what was next just because it was next.  We decided we wanted to live intentionally.  And this is where it gets dicey.  I am not saying that anyone who leads a more traditional life is not living intentionally, but we have chosen a different path - eyes wide open.
5. Its a big world, and we want our kids to learn from being in it, not reading about it.  There is so much that travel and seeing the world can do for our kids, we're looking forward to showing it to them and watching them grow.

Really, this just begins to touch on the question of why and when I read these, they don't begin to do justice to the soul searching done over the last few years.  I guess what it  boils down to is that we felt something was missing - life wasn't what we knew it could be for us.  Ultimately, we want to live differently than we are so we're going to take a chance and see if this fits the bill if not, we'll find a different path.

The Plan

In looking back at the few posts I've made I realize I haven't actually explained the big decision, our plan B.  So in this post I'm hoping to do just what it says, give an overview of the plan.

What is Plan B?  As noted in my post "Big Decision" the plan is to take a bit of a flyer, walk away from "normal" lives and go sailing.

We're not the first to do this, and probably not going to be the last.  Heck, we're not even the first to do it with kids, or minimal sailing experience.  Thing is, it's not about being first, it's about being deliberate, taking a long look at the path we're on, deciding that we don't really like where it's going and having the courage to change direction - even when we don't know where the new path will lead.

Disaster is a possibility, but so is living life as a closer family, living closer to the big blue marble we all live on, and loving every minute of it.

It's kind of funny, cause the only thing that scares me more than going is not going.  Time to be courageous...

So the plan as we outlined it to ourselves was supposed to take 2 years.  In that time we needed to:

• Learn to sail
• Learn about diesel engines (there's less to this than you'd think)
• Learn about radios (there's more to this than you'd think)
• Learn about weather
• Get some sailing experience
• Sell our home
• Sell almost all of our stuff
• Save a lot of money
• Buy a boat

How are we doing?  Well, we've crossed off most of those items and are on track to head off for at least a year which is the length of my leave of absence from work, and very possibly longer.

The planned departure is this coming July.  Over the next several weeks I'll try to lay out how far we've come, some of the things we've learned and what happens next.  If you continue following along, eventually you'll get to see what a nomadic life looks like - for this family at least.

Big Decision

You know those moments in your life when you take a step back and realize that you're making a decision that is momentous?  I mean, truly momentous?  Sometimes they come after long reflection, sometimes they are driven by careful planning and sometimes they arrive like a bolt out of the blue, driven by events outside of your control.

In those moments, you gain a sense of control over your life and future that is liberating and invigorating.

We had one of those moments a little over a two years ago.  The company I work for had begun a series of layoffs, something that is not unusual in many industries but completely unheard of in my company.  In 35 years we had never been through the same degree of change in resources and organization.  With the realization that  no matter how hard I worked or how well I performed, my job was not safe we made a decision that we believe will change our lives.

Plan B is what we called it when we were discussing our options.

The journey towards our goal and life after will form the backbone of this blog.  I intend to document this journey of personal discovery as J. and I take control of our lives, hopefully enriching them and the lives of our children.  It's exciting and kind of scary, we expect it to impact us in ways we can't imagine and we only hope that the impact is positive for us and our children.

The decision?  Some call it crazy (more on that in a future post) but we've decided at some time in the near future to exit the rat race, buy a boat and sail the world.